Lazy grammar complaints

I’ve re-read an old column by Tom Chivers, the Telegraph’s assistant comment editor (a job title I would not have thought existed), discussing a complaint that Noam Chomsky committed a linguistic error by using anticipate in place of expect.

The column was a rollercoaster for me, because my many interactions with honest-to-goodness prescriptivists has rendered me unable to detect well-crafted satires until it’s too late. I swallowed Chivers’s faux stance, clucking my tongue all the while, only to realize at the end, pulling into the station, that there was no real danger there at all. In fact, I felt pretty happy for having read it.

But I had committed myself to becoming miserable from reading something, and in the idiotic hopes of providing that misery, I proceeded to the comments. Why do I do this? Is it some misguided penance for imagined crimes? Well, whatever, here’s a comment:

“Thinking of ’10 items or less’ reminded me of another sign of the times, ‘this door is alarmed’ – alarmed, presumably, by the widespread misuse of the English language.”

Maybe I’ve been suckered once again, and that’s not a complaint from the commenter — but it probably is. And if so, it’s a foolish one; alarmed here is a predicative adjective formed from the past participle of the verb alarm. This sort of functional shift is really common in English, and very productive (by which I mean that it can be generated on the fly and with a wide range of verbs). And it doesn’t cause any distress in other instances, such as “the trap is set”, “the painting is finished”, “the parking meters are bagged”, “the door is locked”, and so on.

It’s not a hard thing to notice that there isn’t really anything unusual or wrong about this sign. I mean, yeah, I can see thinking at first “hmm, that’s an odd turn of phrase.” But it really doesn’t take more than a moment’s thought to see that it’s nothing unordinary. And in general, a lot of the misguided complaints I see are ones where a small amount of thought will reveal that, if the construction isn’t obviously right, it at least isn’t obviously wrong.

Which is a little bit weird, isn’t it? So many of the complaints about grammar are based on this idea that people are saying things without thinking about them (e.g., you’re and your) or saying things only because they hear other people saying them and thus assume they’re acceptable. But in fact, that’s just what the complainers are doing; either they’re not thinking at all and just repeating the condemnation they heard from some some authority figure, or they are thinking, but only in order to amass evidence against the usage.

If you want to be an authority on language — and especially if you’re really as devoted to improving and protecting the language as so many people say they are — then you can’t fall prey to the knee-jerk “doesn’t sound right to me” reaction. You can’t decide you want to complain about a usage and then sit and think only about reasons to discredit it. And, similarly, you can’t do the opposite, deciding that you want to accept something and then only looking for reasons to accept it.* If you can’t do that, then you’re as lazy about policing the language as you think others are about using it.

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*: This is a problem that is much rarer, of course, but I’ll confess to the occasional attack of it when I attempt to argue that some rare or confusing bit of my dialect ought to be considered standard in formal written prose just because it sounds fine to me. “What do you mean we shouldn’t use positive anymore here? You’re trampling my linguistic heritage!”

About The Blog

A lot of people make claims about what "good English" is. Much of what they say is flim-flam, and this blog aims to set the record straight. Its goal is to explain the motivations behind the real grammar of English and to debunk ill-founded claims about what is grammatical and what isn't. Somehow, this was enough to garner a favorable mention in the Wall Street Journal.

About Me

I'm Gabe Doyle, currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Language and Cognition Lab at Stanford University. Before that, I got a doctorate in linguistics from UC San Diego and a bachelor's in math from Princeton.

In my research, I look at how humans manage one of their greatest learning achievements: the acquisition of language. I build computational models of how people can learn language with cognitively-general processes and as few presuppositions as possible. Currently, I'm working on models for acquiring phonology and other constraint-based aspects of cognition.

I also examine how we can use large electronic resources, such as Twitter, to learn about how we speak to each other. Some of my recent work uses Twitter to map dialect regions in the United States.

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12 comments

I’ve seen “This door is alarmed,” and it didn’t strike so much that it was wrong as that it was just plain funny: “The door is alarmed, but the window remains calm.”

FWIW, “to alarm” as a transitive verb does’t _sound_ like it’s very common I mean, as the back-formation for the adjectival form in the “The door is alarmed.” .I don’t personally recall hearing people talk about having to ave some “alarm their doors,” tho I might not hang around with locksmiths or finish carpenters enough, dunno.

I suspect it’s just a matter of time before positive anymore becomes as standard in AmE as its counterintuitive, anti-etymological, misleading as to pronunciation, and downright confusing spelling. Meanwhile, I will continue to write any more (it’s not a compound, phonologically speaking, as anything, anywhere, anyone, anybody are) and use it only in negative contexts, while defending to the death your right to do otherwise.

I’m interested in the psychology that explains why otherwise reasonable people I know (like, for instance, a management researcher or a journalist without linguistic training) demonstrate the kind of shallow thinking you are talking about. They aren’t likely to “complain about [X] and then sit and think only about reasons to discredit it” or decide “to accept [X] and then only looking for reasons to accept it.”

The dictionary treats anymore as a compound, and it sounds like one to me. Note the different stress patterns in the phrase (I don’t want any more ice cream.) and the compound ( I don’t eat ice cream anymore.). Maybe it’s somewhat transitional, not as tightly bound as anything, etc.

You said that the predicate adjective is very productive: it is–as is so is much of English, and that’s really the big problem for the prescripto-fascists who have declared themselves its legal guardians. Productivity allows new constructions to be minted at anytime, by anyone, and that our main form of communication–rather surprisingly–is once again the written word enhances the effect exponentially.

Eugene: I don’t follow you. I don’t hear any stress difference between “any more” in the first sentence and “anymore” in the second sentence. There’s a slight difference in intonation, but I hear the exact same difference in intonation between the word “ice cream” in the two sentences.

Tom Chivers did it again in an article entitled “A lament for the death of the English language” about, amongst other things, the idiomatic BrE expression “He was sat”, in answer to an awful article by Peter Mullen.

Chivers writes – “My colleague Peter Mullen, who cares about such things, has drawn our attention to some of the latest indignities inflicted upon our mother tongue,” and appears to support him, Again not everybody realised it was a joke (he had to point it out to a commenter), and I have to confess to also being taken in at first.

Apart from one little grammatical error: he calls “The fish which Jeremy ate” a sentence, this is an excellent article. Incidentally, one commenter who picked him up on that one also criticised him for not using “that”, so it’s good to see which-hunting is still alive and well.

Daniel: Good question. My sense is that the pre-nominal modifiers constitute a two word phrase (any more), each word having its own stress. I think that would be the unmarked pronunciation, though if you say it fast, I agree that it could sound just like anymore. Also, there’s a paradigmatic set that leads me to think of it as a phrase: I don’t want any more ice cream. I wouldn’t settle for any less ice cream. Please don’t offer me any other ice cream, I need some more ice cream. I want a lot more ice cream…

The adverb, on the other hand, has one primary stress in an unmarked pronunciation (second syllable according to the Merriam Webster): I don’t eat ice cream anymore. However, if you were speaking very emphatically, you could potentially stress both syllables. I told you, I don’t eat ice cream ANY MORE.

The two don’t have to be pronounced differently; there’s no possible ambiguity because the syntax is different.

I do think that anymore is a somewhat tightly bound development based on the phrase any more. In short, I agree with the dictionary on this one.